Sup motherlickers,
Today’s post is
centred around another aspect of vocal performance that I think everyone should
consider in at least a little depth: breathing. And yes, I know, everybody does
it every day and they’re perfectly good at it. But breathing for vocal
performance is a very different kind of animal, because often your normal
breathing won’t accommodate the kind of vocals you’re trying to pull off or you’ll
have about a second to breathe before holding out a twenty second long scream,
so you really have to be in control of your throat and lungs and know song
structures down to a tee. Besides this there are many advantages to being in
control in terms of your breathing. Once you’re totally at home with your
lungs, you can be a lot more precise and interesting with vocal patterns and do
stuff that other people wouldn’t be able to pull off, completely ignoring the
potential for ego massaging and stupidly long screams that will boggle
audiences’ minds.
I’d just like to take a moment to emphasise that this
article actually has very little to do directly with extreme vocals, but a LOT
to do with them in terms of indirect improvement, so like, you can feel free to
ignore this at your own leisure, but if you take a lesson or two from it and
incorporate an exercise from it into your practice routine or even just get a
better idea of how breathing works and consider it in terms of your performance
it will improve your vocal abilities no end. There are countless sources of
breathing techniques to be found online via a quick google search (most of
which are based around the same core techniques), but I’ve never bothered with
them at any length as I already know the basics of what I need to, and the
exercises I’ve either stolen or worked out over the years work for me. If you’re
ever feeling fruity, or want to particularly focus on improving your breathing
technique feel free to wade through the vast amounts on breathing exercises you
can find on the internet. This post will cover the basics of breathing as I understand
them and lay out some exercises I myself do in conjunction with improving my
own abilities.
What follows is a rudimentary run through of what happens
when you breathe in and out, as best I can explain it and you need to
understand it given the context. It may not be the most interesting thing in
the world, but it’s worth considering if you’re going to take the breathing
exercises seriously. As you breathe in, your diaphragm (an elastic muscle
stretched across the bottom of your ribcage) contracts- drawing the air around
the front of your mouth down through your throat and trachea into your lungs.
As the air goes into the lungs, so that they can absorb the oxygen out of the
air, the organs increase in size and volume because of the air they are being
forced to contain. This, in turn, forces the intercostal muscles and the
ribcage to be pushed outwards, expanding the overall size of your chest cavity.
Then, once your lungs have absorbed the oxygen or you force the air out in a
different way, the chest cavity shrinks in size, the diaphragm relaxes and the
air in your lungs is expelled as they shrink in size.
The exercises I am about to detail focus on changing the way
your automatic breathing works, as you breathe a lot differently when you’re
not thinking about it directly and focusing on other tasks (like, for example
headbanging or interacting with the crowd). This is because conscious and
unconscious breathing are controlled by different areas of the brain and are
basically unrelated, so as soon as you start thinking about what you’re doing,
you’re basically using an entirely separate part of your brain. I’m still working on changing my unconscious
breathing to work wholly correctly during a gig situation, and I’ve been
working at it for a few years, so don’t expect it to come massively easily or
immediately. Though, the benefits are noticeable within a fairly short time
frame if you practice these exercises regularly.
What follows are the three breathing exercises that I use on
a regular basis to either expand my lung capacity, make breathing during songs
come to me easier on an unconscious level or just focus a little more on
building up on my torso’s collective muscle memory.
The metronome exercise
This exercise requires the use of an online metronome, it’s
fairly easy to find one online, and any old one will do as long as the metronome
is in time. The exercise itself consists of taking in a breath through your
nose exclusively for a certain number of beats, holding your breath for a
certain number of beats, then expelling air over a prolonged period for a
certain amount of beats.
When I do this exercise it usually goes in a 1:1:2 ratio,
though if you’re feeling confident go for 1:1:4. So an average exercise for me
nowadays is take breathe in through your nose (and only your nose) for 3 or 4
beats (I’m not usually that precise with intake, because I’m never precise
during a live situation), hold it for 6 beats and expel an actual scream for 10
or 12 beats. This doesn’t actually push me at all- but it’s a good thing to do
regularly, as doing it regularly will expand your lung capacity and enable you
to do longer screams and increase the amount of control you have over your
breathing. I mean hell, nowadays I can belt a scream for somewhere between 30
and 50 seconds depending on how much I’ve been drinking that particular week.
This is all down to practice and endurance, so the more you practice, the
better you’ll become.
Sing songs without breathing
This isn’t a structured exercise, more something I’ve done
over the years for amusement that I’m pretty sure has a benefit to my vocals on
any number of levels. Pick any old song that uses extreme vocals. Sing through
it as best you can, without breathing in at any point and just holding your
breath during the gaps. You will be forced eventually to take a breath. In
particularly intense songs, this can be inside the 20 second mark, with others
it will be 2 minutes into the song. Doing this pushes you to really see where
the most important places for breathing occur throughout the song and memorise
them, as well as building up your lung capacity in an indirect way.
Laying down and focusing on stomach breathing
The next exercise is designed to make you focus on breathing/expelling
air from your stomach and not your throat (this is a massively common piece of
advice from vocalists, whether they embrace it themselves or not). In theory,
the more you focus on doing it consciously, the more naturally it will come to
you unconsciously and will make the whole performing vocals shindig a lot
easier.
Lay down flat on your back. Put your hands just a little bit
above your belly button and below where your ribcage ends. Breathe in through
your nose for 5 seconds. Feel which muscles in your torso are working, and how
it feels like it’s actually your stomach that’s expanding (if it doesn’t then
you’re doing it wrong). Hold your breath and make sure no air is expelled for
10 seconds or as long as you can hold it, then expel the air in your lungs
slowly over a period of 5 seconds.
Again, this exercise is fairly indirect, but it helps to
focus on the breathing technique to be used on stage, as it maximises the
amount of air you take in and makes fully sure you take it in with your
diaphragm.
In conclusion, I don’t use all of these
exercises regularly, as I’m fairly good with my breathing technique. At least I
think I am, and I can pull off anything I write without particular focus on
breathing. My general advice would be “don’t be a pussy”. If I can do it, you
can. I’m asthmatic and if pushed can belt a scream longer than any vocalist I’ve
met in the flesh, and this is without any kind of regular breathing
exercises. The key thing is while you’re
learning to do vocals, practice regularly, maybe even get a few lessons from a
classically trained singer (as I intend to do, given I know I could improve in
this particular area), and don’t give up. At the end of the day nobody respects
Chris Barnes because he can hold a scream, people love him for the tones he gets
out of his throat, so don’t sweat it if you can’t get a particularly long
scream or you find the whole breathing thing difficult to get to grips with.
Just keep at it, and if all else fails, listen to the professionals, some of
them aren’t that good at it themselves!
-E
Tomorrow’s post: 7 Myths About Metal Vocals And How They’ll
Affect Your Experience As A Vocalist.
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